Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

What the Jihadists REALLY Have in MindBy James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2008

[An earlier version of this article was published by New York Times Online, October 29, 2004. James Retherford is an Austin activist, graphic designer and regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

“Time is on my side, yes it is.”

The Rolling Stones

If you have been paying attention — really paying attention — then you know already that, since the first War Room meeting after Sept. 11, 2001, and George W. Bush’s infamous “Crusade” speech a few days later, the United States has been losing the Global War on Terror. Losing badly. In fact — please excuse the unfortunate choice of words — it has been a bomb.

First, we lost the Bill of Rights — in particular, habeas corpus and privacy rights — as our elected legislators caved in to White House fear mongering about the “next” enemy attack. Then came and went the Constitution with its notion of separation of powers — George W. Bush anointed himself the supreme “decider.” The unique framework of checks and balances which for more than two centuries provided our nation with the underpinnings of liberty and the ever-present dynamic possibilities of democracy are now heaped in a dumpster behind 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Attacked by a foe radically opposed to secular democratic ideals and institutions, our national leadership quickly (and, let’s not forget, opportunistically) ran up the white flag to surrender of our most sacred national trust, Rule of Law. Without Rule of Law getting in the way, American security specialists (i.e., spooks) can now do their jobs — really do their jobs! — using domestic surveillance, warrantless detention, and torture to keep us safe from each other.A couple policy wonks, Robert Weiner and John Larmett (“War Spending Furthers al-Qaeda Goal of Undermining U.S. Economy,” Billings [MO] Gazette, May 29, 2008), have stumbled onto the rest of the visionary jihadist battle plan which, as I write this, is successfully bringing the American Empire to its knees. Together with a 2004 analysis by New York Times op-ed writers Daniel Benjamin and Gabriel Weimann (“What the Terrorists Have in Mind,” October 27, 2004), these four commentators provide a rare look at the radical Islamists’ strikingly simple strategic and tactical plan to “bleed” the U.S. economy (Weiner and Larmett) by exploiting contradictions between America’s rampant consumerism and the Bush Co.’s imperial objectives. Werner and Larmett quote bin Laden in 2004:

The mujahedeen have finally forced Bush to have recourse to an emergency budget in order to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which indicates the success of the plan to exhaust them to the point of bankruptcy, God willing.

Understanding that Westerners live in a discordant relationship with the dynamics of time and history, our adversaries have an uncannily accurate measure of American weaknesses as well as a demonstrated ability to exploit these flaws with patience and resolve.

Unfortunately this news may come as an unpleasant surprise to many Americans. The Bush administration falsely states that this is a war with a military solution — that is how these superpower imperialists think, unilaterally and one-dimensionally, the gunslinger mentality. So Bush’s defense team called in the heavy weapons. Armed to the teeth with the most intimidating weaponry known to mankind, the U.S. military was ordered to ride into a box canyon and now finds itself boxed in. What good is superior firepower when its use contradicts your strategic goals? Benjamin and Weimann call it “the classic quandary of counterinsurgency: we do not want to use the force necessary to wipe out the terrorists because we would kill numerous civilians and further alienate the Iraqi population.”

I am convinced that the radical Islamist leadership has studied cowboy hubris and has evolved a new methodology of warfare, sort of a value-added guerrilla jihad. Even as the Bushies stage ongoing single-minded preemptive military countermeasures against al Qaeda’s terrorist capabilities, the jihadists themselves have hatched a bold plan to “globalize” the battlefield into the economic and cultural, as well as military, theatres and to wage holy war wherever they themselves choose.

They believe they cannot lose. They believe that the deeper U.S. drives its own oil-leveraged imperial interests into the heart of the Moslem world, the greater will be the demand on American resources around the world to secure and protect supply lines, frontlines and flanks, homeland, and hundreds of potential flashpoints around the world. They envision an American government and its allies so overextending economic, military, and cultural influence to confront Islamic nationalism in a new imperial crusade for oil that the Westerners will sink slowly into the self-made quagmire. Stated in words any corporate accountant will understand, the Islamic militants predict that, as the bills pile up, the American corporatist dream of a 21st century empire will die the death of a thousand paper cuts.

Proclaiming it to be “very important to concentrate on striking the American economy by every possible means,” Osama bin Laden and his associates clearly anticipated the 9/11 attacks as a major blow against America’s economic well-being — and the opening salvo in a perpetual siege to drain the economic life-blood from global capitalism. So far the invoice includes:

1. the costs for the Iraqi, Afghani, and Balkan occupations and day-in day-out military force readiness alert against Iran: according in Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, at least $3 trillion and counting

2. the costs of a so-called “preemptive” military strike against Iran (according to “leaked” sources, now expected to be launched against Iranian Quds facilities in August) and the uncalculated “fallout” — perhaps literal fallout if the Israeli air force attacks Iranian nuclear facilities in a coordinated air offensive — in terms of Iranian military retaliation as well as the cost of trying to contain the collective outrage of the people of North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East as we take our anger to the streets.

3. the costs for securing borders, transportation, infrastructure, industry (especially nuclear, petrochemical, and chemical), government buildings, and events such as gala global economic summits and international media spectacles, e.g. the Olympics and the U.S. political conventions: approximately $250 billion since 2001 (with many billions more secreted inside other spending packages)

5. the willingness to borrow a trillion dollars or more from our historic ideological enemy, China, in order to maintain wealthy Americans’ unsustainably opulent lifestyles and to pay for protracted imperial wars

The jihadists correctly predict that the Western-style democracies, to mitigate against global inflation while vastly increasing military and security spending across the board, will choose to savage social programs serving millions of middle-class, working-class, and nonworking-class citizens rather than pass the escalating costs on to their corporate sponsors as higher taxes. Such policy will widen the class gap between the have-nots and what George W. Bush affectionately calls the “have-mores” and will further destabilize Western-style democracies.

Brothers of the Cross and the Crescent

I have described this as a kind of “value-added” guerrilla jihad and suggested how the economic component is inextricably tied to the terror-centered military campaign. Now I would like to describe the jihadists’ startling success on a third front: the culture war.

It is well documented how America’s tradition of tolerance and moral/ethical relativism is disgusting to radical Islamists. In this context, then, our nation’s enemies must view the U.S. government’s lock-step march to USA-PATRIOT, the legalizing of domestic spying, and dismantling of habeas corpus as a spectacular and ridiculously easy victory. What the jihadists wanted, the Bush administration delivered — a new vision of America stripped of many of those unique but suddenly deemed unnecessary personal freedoms fought for and won by our Founding Fathers in their own war on tyranny and terror. The Bush White House and Congress displayed the intellectual resolve and historical understanding of a flock of dodo birds as they walked off the deep end. Ironically, Islamic fundamentalists find themselves on the same page as Christian fundamentalists on this moral crusade — brothers of the cross and the crescent seeking to deliver America to the doorstep of faith-based fascism.

America’s headlong descent into the politics of fear must be seen by the defiant survivors of Tora Bora as further proof that Allah has chosen this ragtag group of Islamic cultists to wield the scimitar that will smite Western civilization and its crusading infidels. The mere idea — supported by televised image — of an effete American populace cowering in terror as Michael Chertoff orchestrates his light show on cue to pull in the “fear” vote … such a vision must make Osama’s followers feel mighty righteous. George Bush evoked the memory of FDR to hype his own handling of the “global war on terror,” but the contrast in message then and now is stark. Bush tells us that we have everything to fear. Six decades ago an undaunted American president stood strong after Pearl Harbor and convinced this shaken land that we “have nothing to fear but fear itself?”

Finally, as economic war segues between religious crusade and market meltdowns, the class divisions re-emerging in the United States are also gaining momentum in the Middle East — wherever oil-wealthy, pro-Western, anti-democratic Arab regimes require American firepower and state-sponsored interpretation of the Koran to contain their own restless masses. I must add, however, that militant Arabs — unlike many American voters — seem to be able to determine the difference between a genuine political leader and a snake in the grass. The problem apparently is more complicated for us Americans since most of our politicians and corporate media commentators are known to speak with forked tongues.

In conclusion, I have stated that we face a motivated opponent with an expansive, non-linear sense of time, a single-minded objective, and a devout understanding of historical imperative and that we are going to war against this relentless foe behind national political and military “leadership” for whom time is measured by the length of the media news cycle and history is to be repeated until the desired outcome is obtained. The Three Stooges at the White House, Department of Defense, and the State Department are in charge of the battle planning and nation building. “Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk” sums up our foreign policy.

Meanwhile our enemies are content to wait and pick their fights until Western civilization implodes — culturally and economically and militarily — from arrogance, fear, wasteful extravagance, and self-serving contradictions. Even if the conflict lasts another thousand years or more.

If you are an Arab or Persian mujahadeen, why not wait and fight, fight and wait, carefully picking the target? Islamic populations comprise the fastest-growing demographic group in the world, insuring an endless army of holy warriors and martyrs. “Iraq,” as Benjamin and Weimann point out, “in fact, has become a theater of inspiration for this drama of faith.”

Against this stark tableau of Islamic insurgency, U.S. leadership is auditioning for the role of emperor of the world, but the emperor has no clothes and is reading from a script borrowed from Dumb and Dumber.

War Spending Furthers al-Qaeda Goal of Undermining US EconomyBy Robert Weiner and John Larmett / May 30, 2008

The Bush administration has chosen to sink taxpayers’ money into Iraq over public investment, undermining the US economy and infrastructure.

As the Congress takes up the latest Bush administration “supplemental” appropriation of another $160 billion for the war in Iraq, the impact of the war on families has been enormous. Montana now has the highest number per capita of killed or wounded in the country – 26.09 per 100,000 population – and a total of 250 deaths or injuries as of May 10.

In fact, the Congress should consider whether the funding – almost a trillion dollars to date – helps al-Qaida more than us. The question of whom the war funding actually helps and its draining of our own needs should be a major issue in the June 3 Montana primary.

In his audio addresses, Osama bin Laden has underscored the importance of hitting economic targets, threatening the United States with financial ruin. Bleeding the U.S. economy is an explicitly stated and oft-repeated aim of al-Qaida. In 2004, soon after the war began, bin Laden stated clearly: “The Mujahedeen have finally forced Bush to have recourse to an emergency budget in order to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which indicates the success of the plan to exhaust (them) to the point of bankruptcy, God willing.” Bin Laden emphasized the economic nature of the targets chosen in New York City for the Sept. 11 attacks, proclaiming it to be “very important to concentrate on striking the American economy by every possible means.”

Draining Our Economy

He must be thrilled we’ve continued the emergency supplemental war funding, draining our economy for more than five years and counting. The U.S. economy is spiraling into crisis with the costs of oil and gas, college education, food doubling and tripling since 2001, drugs and other staples not far behind and home foreclosures at all-time highs.

Al-Qaida continues this objective right to the present.

The war in Iraq has been the economic disaster for the United States that bin Laden, without even having to deploy many resources, wished for (our own intelligence agencies confirm that al-Qaida is no more than 2 percent of the Iraq insurgents; the remainder is the civil strife that has persisted there for centuries).

With just the amount of our Iraq budget in 2007, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi points out, our government could instead have repaired 70,000 bridges across the U.S. rated deficient; rebuilt the New Orleans levees; covered all children in the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan; equipped U.S. agencies with interoperable communications equipment not available on Sept. 11, 2001; enrolled 1.4 million more children in Head Start; doubled the budget for the National Cancer Institute; screened all air cargo for 10 years; and hired 51,000 more police officers. Instead, Bush has vetoed programs like CHIP and insisted on war dollars. All the while, al-Qaida has regrouped and strengthened outside Iraq – in Afghanistan and around the world.

Fewer Jobs Created

While the Clinton administration created 23 million new jobs, Bush has created 6 million – the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover. The Bush administration chose to sink taxpayers’ money into Iraq over public investment.

It is counterproductive to our own security that we paradoxically give al-Qaida exactly what it wants. The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate – now suddenly blocked from public view by the Bush administration likely because the document has spoken too much truth – stated on Jan. 13, 2005, that the war in Iraq “provides terrorists with a training ground” and “opportunity,” and “the Jihadists will disperse to other countries” and “merge with local movements.”

As to the president’s objective to “fight them over there so we don’t have to over here,” the real question is whether it’s al-Qaida keeping us bottled up in Iraq instead of the other way around. It’s the classic strategy – divert the enemy to another location away from you, so that they will lose time, troops and effort – while you conduct your own priorities with no interference. Is al-Qaida beating us at our own game?

[Editor’s note: The war deaths and injuries statement is based on ICasualties data and U.S. Census population numbers. Wyoming is a distant second at 19.31.

Democratic strategist Robert Weiner is a former spokesman in the Clinton White House. John Larmett is former foreign policy assistant and press secretary to Sen. Gaylord Nelson and Rep. Jim McDermott.]

2 Responses to Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

It seems that, then Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s pottery metaphor regarding the Iraq invasion, “if you break it you bought it”, is being proved true. Breaking things is usually expensive, no value is gained, and considerable clean up is involved.

There are some good unintended consequences that may flow from this debacle. One is that the erosion of civil rights, which at a lower level may have remain unnoticed, is now dramatically in the spotlight. Two, the reliance on fossil fuel to power our economy and lifestyle is called into question with unsustainably high fuel costs. Other issues and agendas that have remained under the radar are being similarly revealed.

It is even possible that the only trump card to corporate money influencing public policy may be played. The only piece of paper with more power than the dollar is the ballot.

Great articles. Definite pieces on the costs of the war. Does anyone know how many millions of barrels of oil are being used by the military each day in Iraq? I’m sure this is also a major contributor to the oil shortage. I imagine a steel-covered Humvee probably gets a little bit less mileage than a Prius.